[Info-vax] $GETTIM and $GETTIM_PREC on modern systems

[Some Dude]

On Friday, July 8, 2022 at 1:16:24 PM UTC-4, Simon Clubley wrote:

> 
> It is a shared system pool based on information observable at system 
> level, or are VSI implementing some per-process hack ? 

It's a VMS adaptation (nearly a complete code lift) of the Fortuna code in FreeBSD.  The V9.2 version works.  V9.x prior to V9.2, the service was there but returned "random-looking" data from the well-named internal hack called fake_entropy.  There will be future refinements. The entropy harvester is the portion of code that most diverges from FreeBSD and the stochastic sources differ somewhat.  As a server-based OS, we don't track mouse movement, for example.

And before anyone asks, V9.2 does support the RDRAND instruction if both the hardware and hypervisor do.  It's not a given and may actually vary by underlying hardware/OS for the same hypervisor. RDRAND is just of the sources hashed into pool.